When someone wants me to change my stated opinion or message for the sake of an “alliance I might need in the future”, I’m immediately wary.
If they believe that something is worth sticking up for, my feelings about it wouldn’t matter, would they? And if my feelings are enough to dissuade them, what kind of ally might they be?
Requiring that I change my opinion to meet theirs in the spirit of “alliance” smacks of emotional blackmail.
Indeed; it sounds both opportunistic and unreliable, at best.
That’s what I was saying, this isn’t a communications issue, it’s a substantive issue. It is not the way that others are expressing themselves that makes you reject their point of you, you reject their actual point of view. Similarly, they may reject yours. So it was never about losing your possible support, it was about a disagreement on the place of violence.
The point of the article is that when you are met with Nazi thugs you have two options: offer your body as a sacrifice to non-violence, or rely on someone else to do the violence for you. If a person does in fact kneel before a Nazi gang and offers themselves up to be killed, I have nothing but respect for that but they will be killed. They will be killed by a person who will enjoy killing them and who will seek to replicate that high in the future by killing again. Because that’s the sort of person who kills people at a Nazi rally. There’s no redemption in it.
I think the success of non-violent protest (MLK, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela) has been dramatically overstated. In every example of non-violent resistance to oppression there was parallel violent resistance. In every example the change seemed to come as a result of generational churn on the part of the oppressor, not as a result of some power non-violence has.
I think it serves powerful people well if everyone believes that the best way to resist them is by being non-violent.
I think that progress requires a big diversity of voices. One spectrum we have diversity on is willingness to be involved in violence for the cause. I think that everyone adding to the struggle in whatever way they can is what makes change come, so I try not to shout down anyone who believes they have a way forward. What I can’t get behind talking about what we have to do to make and keep allies. If we had a way to get a huge number of people to behave in some way, we could turn that way on the Nazis and solve the problem directly instead of turning it on one another. I want us all to do our best to make things better without getting into “If you’re going to be that way then I’m not going to be on your side anymore.”
That being said, I can totally understand someone drawing a line at violence and saying that’s a step too far. I probably would have told you that was one of my values, but it turns out when non-violence clashed with anti-Nazi in my head, I cared more about the latter.
Is it better to tell your grandchildren “Yeah, I just sat back and let them take over instead of fighting back”?
There are times when pacifism works, and times when it doesn’t. If the entire world was united in passively resisting Hitler in 1939 I can’t see how that would have stopped him, it would have been like blades of grass passively resisting a lawnmower.
Which isn’t to say what we see today is 1939, but if it came to that point I hope you would re-think your position on the subject.
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